Carte Blanche

As the biographer of her husband Bob Hawke, Blanche d'Alpuget knows all about politics and scheming - the perfect background for her new project on kings and crusades. By Susan Wyndham.

24 August 2013 — 3:00am

With the final editing done on her first novel in 20 years, Blanche d'Alpuget has had time to turn her attention away from 12th-century France and confront the future. ''I went and bought us two graves this week, side by side, at Macquarie Park,'' she says, followed by an earthy laugh that suggests the job was not oppressive. ''We both want to be cremated, so we talked through which city, because his relations are in graves in other states. I was thinking of having my ashes thrown into Sydney Harbour, but then I thought I really want the ashes to be beside Bob and he obviously has to have a spot where people can come and look.''

The man in question, Bob Hawke - former prime minister and d'Alpuget's husband of 18 years - returns from the gym to the glass-walled living room where she and I sit on ivory-coloured leather facing the view over a northern inlet of Sydney Harbour. ''Hello, darling,'' she says.

"The only thing I fear is not getting finished what I’m meant to finish" … Blanche d’Alpuget.

Photo: Tim Bauer

''Hello, sweed'eart,'' he says, all smiles and banter and a kiss for his wife. ''Getting all the secrets?'' he asks me, before retreating in his black tracksuit to the kitchen for his daily two hours of mental exercise on cryptic crosswords and ''hard'' sudoku puzzles. At 83, he doesn't seem in imminent need of a grave, but d'Alpuget says she was prompted into action by the ugly arguments over where the former South African leader Nelson Mandela would be buried and word that a new area was opening up in the northern Sydney cemetery.

She has chosen ''elegant'' marble tombstones, which will be engraved with the words she and Hawke agree on. ''Once you're dead, you have no say over what happens and I don't want the family to be left in a quandary over what to do with one or both of us," d'Alpuget says.

“We have some kind of energetic connection’’ … Bob Hawke and Blanche d’Alpuget at their Sydney home.

Photo: Tim Bauer

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Perhaps the publicly mourned death of Hawke's first wife, Hazel, in May gave them a subconscious nudge. The Hawke children did not invite their stepmother to the memorial service and d'Alpuget understood but was ''a little bit hurt'', says Hawke later at his city office. Her focus on where their ashes will lie might be the result of debilitating pain after shoulder surgery, which has left her ''physically depressed'', he says. ''I don't think about ageing very much, I enjoy life.''

D'Alpuget is frustrated that she has been unable to write for nine weeks when we meet. She looks tiny in her high-ceilinged home, wrapped in a Peruvian llama-wool sweater and rolled-up trousers; she is, however, made-up, manicured and, at 69, exudes the drive of a woman with much more to achieve. Even in low gear she lives up to her theatrical name, vamping, simpering, mimicking accents and puncturing her own earn-estness with that deep laugh.

Does she fear death? ''Au contraire,'' d'Alpuget says. ''The only thing I fear is not getting finished what I'm meant to finish in two senses: the actual work I'm meant to do - and that is the writing, and I feel I'm meant to write this quartet. After that I'd like to get on the speaking circuit and get over my horror of people looking at me and stand on stage and talk. And on a spiritual level, I want to do the work of purification and refinement that goes on in this life and, as I understand it, beyond.''

The quartet, which has outgrown a planned trilogy, seems at first an unexpected leap for a writer of contemporary fiction and political biography. Beginning at the end of the second Christian crusade in 1149 and ending four decades later with the launch of the failed third crusade, it follows the rise of the French-born Plantagenet kings of England. The first book, The Young Lion (published next week by HarperCollins), is an intimate and raunchy imagining of the political manoeuvres and sexual passions that lead Eleanor of Aquitaine to leave her husband, French King Louis VII, for her lover, Geoffrey the Handsome, Duke of Normandy, and then Geoffrey's teenage son, who will become Henry II of England and father of Richard the Lionheart.

Nice day for a white wedding … Bob Hawke and Blanche d’Alpuget on their 1995 wedding day in Sydney.

Photo: fairfaxsyndication.com

''It's the Hawke government in 1150,'' jokes screenwriter John Lonie, a friend who advised d'Alpuget on early drafts.

''He's drawing a long bow,'' she says.

''That's Lonie,'' Hawke says with an eye roll.

But both concede Lonie's point that ''she knows the world of politics and scheming, and politics doesn't change''. Lonie encouraged her as she wrote: ''You know all this. You wrote the biography of Bob: he's a warrior, as is Henry.''

Bob and I have virtually nothing in common … [but] we’re both very interested in geopolitics.

D'Alpuget's return to writing fiction is the reason for our conversations at the Northbridge house - in shadow treasurer Joe Hockey's Liberal electorate in northern Sydney - that Hawke and Hazel built as their retirement home and d'Alpuget has remodelled in sleek executive style. The art collection includes a sculpture by her 40-year-old son Louis, an award-winning artist who lives in the boathouse at the bottom of the garden and plays snooker with his stepfather.

The Young Lion marks a new phase in her life. David Dillon, the son of Hawke's daughter Rosslyn, says, ''It's a huge shift for her career. She knows within herself there was a period when she wasn't pushing her creative potential. She sat on the bench for a while and now she's back on the field.''

However you try to honour d'Alpuget as the author, feminist and strong, intelligent woman she is, it is impossible to decouple her career from her long involvement with Hawke. Hazel's death - a relief to her family after her long decline from Alzheimer's - might finally free d'Alpuget from her image as the Other Woman, which was revived by actor Asher Keddie in the 2010 telemovie Hawke.

She's had a sometimes-bumpy relationship with Hawke's daughters but Dillon is close to her and says, ''There has been a gradual process of seeing how happy my grandfather was. Blanche's love and support for him is unequivocal and the wider family appreciates that. She's always been true to herself and never tried to replace Hazel.''

The legendary affair flared after she interviewed him as ACTU president for her 1977 biography of the arbitrator Sir Richard Kirby and flickered on and off while she researched Hawke's 1982 biography, which helped propel him to the prime ministership. D'Alpuget insists it was not she who destroyed his marriage, but his ''literally hundreds of affairs''. Hawke tells me sternly she did not ''steal'' him: ''It's very simple - we fell in love.''

In the 1980s and early '90s, d'Alpuget built a reputation as the acclaimed literary novelist of Monkeys in the Dark, Turtle Beach, Winter in Jerusalem and White Eye. The books were inspired by the years she spent in Indonesia and Malaysia with her first husband, the Australian diplomat Tony Pratt, before they divorced in 1986; her trip to Israel and Hawke's experiences there; her interest in contemporary issues such as politics, war, religion, feminism, love, and - she once said - her own neuroses. Single and separated from her son, who lived with his father as a teenager, she wrote furiously for a living until, after the 1993 biotechnology thriller White Eye, she abandoned fiction altogether. A novel about the 9th-century Holy Roman Emperor, Charlemagne, stalled.

''I was written out after White Eye and I needed a break,'' she says. ''I tend to go like a bull at a gate at everything and I had worked terrifically hard for 20 years as a writer, because I'm not a fast writer. I'd run out of story.''

Dipping back into journalism, she wrote an essay called Lust about being molested at 12 by a judge and running away to Melbourne at 17 with a much older Polish man. She was escaping from her father, Lou d'Alpuget, the news editor of Sydney's Sun newspaper and a champion boxer, who beat her when he found out about her lover.

''When I was growing up I was like a girl in a paddock with a bull and I had to be terrifically on guard or the bull would kill me," she says. "One of the things I noticed early on with Bob was that people were very attracted to him, but very frightened of him. I still see it. I think that was a reason I was always able to get on with Bob, because I was brought up by a man who was terrifying.''

D'alpuget's life was transformed by marriage to Hawke in 1995, months after his divorce from Hazel. Their love, never extinguished, had rekindled when she worked with him on The Hawke Memoirs two years earlier. In the media spotlight on the Bob and Blanche show, which they alternately fled and fed (Woman's Day paid a reported $200,000 for an interview and famous photos in bathrobes), D'Alpuget committed to doing ''whatever it takes'' to share the next 10 or 15 active years with her husband, even if that meant never writing again. It was a sign, she said, of her happiness.

What binds such different people so intensely together? Hawke talks about d'Alpuget's ''practical intelligence'', her beauty, her character, their shared interest in what makes the world tick and how it can work better. ''You've gathered that I'm still dotty about her,'' he says, his craggy face softened by tenderness.

D'Alpuget answers the question with gusto. ''Who would think? I don't know one end of a football field from the other. He's mad on crossword puzzles; I can't think of anything worse. I love the movies; he's very picky about movies. He only likes political thrillers to read, or non-fiction. So we have virtually nothing in common.'' But she goes on: ''The meeting points are we're both very interested in geopolitics, so we talk about politics a lot - often it's like gossip, but it's a passion for both of us. He's a very indulgent husband; he would let me do - or, if I wanted to, buy - anything I like. But beyond that it's that funny word L-O-V-E. We have some kind of energetic connection.''

A few days later she emails me ''a fuller but non-exhaustive list'' of their mismatches: he loves raw onion, mashed potato, mud crabs and pasta; she hates them. He still consumes alcohol daily; she's a teetotaller. He loves the sun; she doesn't. He loves sport; she hates it but loves exercise. He's a good sleeper and she's not. He's musically educated and she's not. She loves to dance and he never learnt. He is out of his comfort zone with her ''weird friends'' but has, for example, learnt to enjoy their visits to the Woodford Folk Festival.

Perhaps their most serious difference is Hawke's long-declared agnosticism and d'Alpuget's devotion to her spiritual growth, which has filled lonely times, infused her writing, inspired mystical visions, and allowed her to witness her mother's ''blissful rapture'' at the moment of death, which she understands as rebirth into the spiritual world. Her search has led her to the Quakers, meditation, Johannine Christianity and, in the early 1990s, the Independent Church of Australia, whose leader was urging her to train as a priest until she felt her loyalty torn between him and Hawke.

''I would never join any organised religion again,'' she says. Most recently she has returned to Subud, a practice of spiritual ''opening'' to the Holy Spirit that she had explored in Indonesia, and now attends their meetings every Sunday.

''It changes your vibration,'' she says. ''I think I'm a better person than I used to be, much more in control of those lower forces. One of the negative things is you can see the ugliness in people a lot more and it's sometimes absolutely terrifying. We're under the force of some very malevolent spiritual beings. We're more machine-driven, more numbers-driven, more money-driven and there's a far higher degree of selfishness. We're in a time of enormous transition and so it's very chaotic.''

Along with her spirituality, d'Alpuget has a relentless dedication to diet, exercise and alternative health therapies. She says she is good at maintenance, from house to body, and reckons her care gave their Rhodesian ridgeback an extra year of life.

Although she admits to ''a vain gene'' from her father and grandmother, my tentative question about her attitude to cosmetic surgery brings a cool blast: ''You debase yourself in asking questions that are both stigmatising and sexist.'' The only other question she refuses is about an alleged physical altercation between her and Susan Pieters-Hawke. ''I don't want to say it was true or untrue and neither does she.''

She says she's an introvert but she's also an outgoing friend with a risque sense of humour. Her son Louis says: ''She's a little Mighty Mouse. She's very generous and compassionate, but people hardly ever see that because she tries to present herself as more of a fighter than she really is.''

As Hawke's wife and business partner, the private, spiritual d'Alpuget has ''lived the life of Riley''. For years they travelled overseas every six weeks or so to establish his consultancy business, introducing Australian and Chinese companies, and turned out for Labor Party bashes. D'Alpuget enjoyed her encounters with Mandela, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush as governor of Texas, and the Queen at a Buckingham Palace dinner for the centenary of federation.

I suggest she would have enjoyed being the prime minister's wife. ''No,'' she says. ''I didn't imagine anything beyond love. In fact, I didn't want to marry him but he said, and he was right, 'We have to get married.' He realised how socially unacceptable it would be [if we didn't].''

She sat in on business meetings, often the only woman among a dozen men in a smoke-filled room. ''I don't think I added anything at all except I would occasionally say, 'I 100 per cent do not trust that man.' I used to watch people and although they all spoke Chinese or Japanese or whatever, I would occasionally try to warn Bob off doing any deals.'' Did he listen? ''No.''

Psychiatrist Michael Epstein has known d'Alpuget for more than 30 years (''as a buddy, I've never been to a psychiatrist,'' she notes). He says, ''She has a great capacity for feeling other people's pain and joy, which makes her a fabulous novelist. She looks at you with those big eyes like laser beams, focusing on you, absorbing what it is you are transmitting.'' There's also the fierce woman Epstein saw when the three of them travelled to Chile. ''In Santiago, there was a Christian missionary shouting through a megaphone. Blanche marched over to the guy and shoved her hand into his megaphone and told him to shut up.''

Eventually, d'Alpuget cut back on travel, tired of cigarette smoke and exotic diseases. Like Hawke, she had been a heavy smoker but quit in 1986 after treatment by a kinesiologist. Now she sends him outside to suck on his cigars. He, too, is slowing down, though he recently made his 95th trip to China and wants to take d'Alpuget to Prague and St Petersburg.

''It was an absolutely marvellous, exciting and stimulating life, and initially I missed writing a great deal,'' she says. ''I'm someone that if I'm writing that's all I can do.'' As the desire to write bubbled up again, she wrote On Longing, essentially an artful confession of her romance with Hawke in all its clandestine passion and pain. Two years later she published Hawke: The Prime Minister, a sequel to the first biography, with only a single sentence about her role in his life.

It was time for her to move on from Hawke as her subject and an old interest began to resurface. In the 1960s, when she was a journalist, she recalls: ''Young smartarses, among whom I include myself, when they disagreed with anybody would say, 'Oh, one of the great minds of the 12th century.' We thought of the 12th century as the Dark Ages. One day I'd said it about somebody and I thought, 'I don't know anything about the 12th century,' and I started to read and discovered it was actually a renaissance.''

She learnt the crusades had brought to Europe the classical Roman and Greek knowledge that had been preserved by the Arabs. ''I forgot about it entirely, but I had this whole library when I decided I wanted to write about this era. It had tweaked something in me. In the late '80s, early '90s, I became interested in the crusades - I think you could feel something in the air.''

To research The Young Lion, she read masses of history and travelled with friends to England and France, where she had an ''extraordinarily moving experience'' that led her to the probable site of Henry II's death at Chinon Castle in 1189. ''It sounds ridiculous, but I have some sort of energetic connection with Henry,'' d'Alpuget says. ''I feel he wants his story retold now.'' By coincidence, or perhaps not, her father's family were Jews from Aquitaine who had been thrown out of Spain in 1492 and eventually settled in Bordeaux until her great-grandfather came to Australia.

Once she began writing, d'Alpuget was at her office - a simple apartment in northern Sydney's Cammeray - each weekday by 9am and ruled that she could not accompany her husband to social events on ''school nights'' even in an election year. ''Fiction is a very blissful activity,'' she says.

When her agent, Margaret Gee, sent the huge manuscript out to several publishers, they sent it back. Rather shockingly, d'Alpuget's name wasn't enough. But after much pruning and polishing with help from a structural editor, she found a keen publisher in the first person to read it, Jeanne Ryckmans at HarperCollins, also the publishers of Hilary Mantel's novels about Thomas Cromwell. ''I remember Blanche in a fabulous caftan bringing it in herself,'' says Ryckmans. ''She's flirtatious, charismatic and charming. She can weave a fantastic story that is greatly entertaining and brings the characters to life. Mediaeval France leaps off the page, and it's sexy, too. She's quite a masculine writer - she can be very brusque and never prissy.''

D'Alpuget was deep into writing the second novel when she was in the accident that tore a shoulder already damaged from a lifetime of misadventures and too much boxing with her personal trainer.

At 19 she was thrown through the windscreen of a Volkswagen when her boyfriend fell asleep at the wheel; when Morry Schwartz, who had published Robert J. Hawke, drove her through the desert in Israel he rolled the car; researching a travel story on the Whitsundays in 1993, she was in a seaplane that crashed into the ocean. ''I prayed the entire time," she says.

"I tend to get tremendously calm in those things. It's as if a spirit takes over. I was so calm I took my handbag with me.''

Almost four months ago, she ended up in surgery after a car smashed into hers on a wet road. D'Alpuget meditated before the operation and felt assured that it would give her a longer life. ''And no doubt it will be very good for the book,'' she says. Her enforced period of reflection has already clarified her treatment of the complicated character of Thomas Becket, who was giving her difficulty. ''He's such a piece of work,'' she says with a glint in her eye that suggests she's more than a match for the old archbishop.

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